(AP) -- Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the power of the dark lord Morgoth...

It is the fruit of 30 years labor by Christopher Tolkien, the author's son, who has devoted much of his life to editing and publishing the work his father left behind. By meticulously combining and editing the many published and unpublished versions of the tale, he has produced at last a coherent, vivid and readable narrative.

His story, released today by Houghton Mifflin, is a publishing event: It is the first new book by the creator of "The Lord of the Rings" in 30 years. The publisher calls it the culmination of an effort to bring to the public the vast body of work J.R.R. Tolkien had left unpublished, and largely unfinished, when he died in 1973.

Tolkien began writing "The Children of Hurin" 99 years ago, abandoning it and taking it up again repeatedly throughout his life. Versions of the tale already have appeared in "The Silmarillion," "Unfinished Tales" and as narrative poems or prose sections of the "History of Middle-earth" series.

But they were truncated and contradictory. Outside of Tolkien scholars and Middle-earth fanatics, few read them.

These works were, after all, largely unreadable -- dense, hard to follow histories and legends of Tolkien's vast, imaginary world, crammed with complicated genealogies, unfamiliar geography and hard-to-pronounce names. Readers who took up such books hoping for another Rings saga or charming yarn such as "The Hobbit" abandoned them after a few pages.

"The Children of Hurin" is the book for which these readers have been longing.

But they were truncated and contradictory. Outside of Tolkien scholars and Middle-earth fanatics, few read them.

I read them, with the understanding that they were truncated and contradictory. The various versions still offered flashes of brilliance and beauty. It was like reading fragments of an ancient saga from differing eras and writers. But in this case, it was from a single genius who developed a universe and mythology that he spent his entire life working on.

Lord of the Rings was a tiny sliver of his universe that still took the author years to complete, despite loyal readers clamoring for the whole story.

My copy arrived today! It’s beautiful. The illustrations are fabulous. Of course, I skipped through it to see them first. I’ve only read the preface so far. I’ll start the story tomorrow. I’ve read it before in it’s other forms, but this is going to be fantastic!

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posted on 04/19/2007 2:51:27 AM PDT
by athelass
(Proud Mom of a Sailor and a Marine! Frodo Lives!)

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